“This love, in which some have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s secret. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is the movement by which life is transmitted.”—Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

You and I don’t matter. We are nothing, and we will be gone in a fortnight or two.

Can you get your head around that fact? And if you truly can, do you feel as I do an exhilarating sense of liberation?

The living being “… above all a thoroughfare.” You and I nothing but a Passing Through, a conduit… nay, more, a conduit and that which flows through at one and the same time!

And the thoroughfare is nothing other than the Great Mystery, ever lying at hand, ever at our fingertips, ever forgotten and ever in need of relearning.

All ritual, all high culture symbolism, aims at precisely that instruction.

Of course, we Homo Sapiens accomplish this thoroughfaring in community—and it’s proven quite a successful biological method—so the vast majority of ritual and symbolism is geared towards instruction into the thoroughfaring of a specific group of people, a defined community. However, now and then an outcast oddball visionary appears who would have us Homo Sapiens look at the bigger picture, one outside of the narrow reaches of our own specific community to a larger one, that of all humankind, or perhaps all Life.

Often enough woe betide him or her.

But that’s another story.

Besides, he or she suffers the group’s opprobrium out of love. Love for the community, for humankind in general, and above all for Life.

Love, the key to Life’s Secret.

I love that.